Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
Sure, the format is slow and somewhat complex, but then it seems like all the places are devoid of non-immediate conversations.
Companies are moving to the Slack, informal groups to the Discord. I've been using IRC for years and I still love it but with recent adoption of Slack it seems everyone wants to push all the communication there and I don't think it works. It's hard to search for stuff (usually it takes me 3-4 queries to find thing _I know_ is there) and then it's in lengthy conversational format that takes a bit of time to replay. You might lose window of opportunity to provide important info just because you aren't present at the moment and since Slack is perceived as a low impact tool, those conversations can happen in late evening hours.
And yet all the places that (in my opinion) were better to have more fruitful, thoughtful and searchable conversations are slowly winding down. Newsgroup are long dead, mailing lists are perceived as archaic, forums are closing down one by one. It might be me, but I start to get feeling that even on StackOverflow conversations aren't what they used to be. Only e-mail is left - in some places at least, because some organization start to have "why send an e-mail while you could send Slack message". Thankfully those organization usually bless users with capability of installing Slack on their private phones /s
Too bad Google Wave didn't pick up.
In all seriousness, by far the best professional discussion i have ever had was at a company in 2000 which ran an internal NNTP server. For me, that combined the relevant strengths of email with a format more suited to active multi-party discussion.
Timeless advice. Still applicable in tech thanks to open-source software, even as people lose agency in other areas.
Mind you, newsgroups had their dark aspects, too. Some binary groups had contents you'd prefer not to see - simply because the public at large was not really aware NNTP exists.
That event was called Eternal September, and netiquette has never been the same, or so I am told.
Mailing lists work because they work best with old-fashioned email. Old-fashioned email just works better. It requires a certain level of training to use properly (e.g. how to do inline quoting etc.). This is a good thing. But people seem reluctant to learn skills as an adult, especially when it comes to IT.
More importantly, mailing lists rely on etiquette (netiquette) to function well. This is essential for any interactions between responsible adults. But nowadays people have been trained to expect coded rules. They are used to operating in a playpen where they can test the boundaries with no consequences, like children.
Discord is just the latest regression in a long line of distilling what it means to have discourse into a few easily managed rules. It's ironic because, on the face of it, Discord with its huge array of "stickers", "emojis" and "fun" attachments etc. seems like it should be more expressive and allow for deeper discussion. But, in fact, by pushing aside language, etiquette and training in favour of emojis, canned phrases, and strict rules we get shallow, repetitive, and, frankly, boring exchanges. Great for mindless drones to do bullshit jobs, I'm sure. Bad for deep and enlightening discussion and debate.
however the real (search) power of the mailing lists is of course that you have the mails locally for the lists where you are subscribed to...
i remember forum searches becoming so heavy, site wide search forms had to be hidden behind sign up walls... and it was mostly poor keywords search, forget about full text.
with local emails at least i get a shot at organizing and searching for it. try saving a local copy of a forum thread...
I think netiquette breaks down the moment you have a diverse group of participants. (Early Usenet) and (Fidonet) were comprised of very knowledgeable participants of very similar cultural milleus. Usenet was mostly scholarly, young, white, and male (the standard demographic of academics at the time, I'm not trying to insinuate anything more than that), and Fidonet was more diverse because it was less tied to academia but was also very specific. That's not to say something like netiquette couldn't be enforced, but I also think it's correlation and not causation that early Usenet and Fidonet had meaningful conversations; I've been in Discord/Matrix rooms with mostly highly educated people with similar outlooks on life and they rarely require moderation, even with varying strong opinions.
> Discord is just the latest regression in a long line of distilling what it means to have discourse into a few easily managed rules. It's ironic because, on the face of it, Discord with its huge array of "stickers", "emojis" and "fun" attachments etc. seems like it should be more expressive and allow for deeper discussion. But, in fact, by pushing aside language, etiquette and training in favour of emojis, canned phrases, and strict rules we get shallow, repetitive, and, frankly, boring exchanges. Great for mindless drones to do bullshit jobs, I'm sure. Bad for deep and enlightening discussion and debate.
This just comes off as angry and elitist. Discords are there for regular people to engage in conversations. I don't think putting up these barriers to engagement is relevant for anything other than selecting for technical trivia or ability. If you want to actually select for a good community, I agree that moderation is important, but not using technical barriers. I'm glad the internet is such that nowadays I'm not just talking to some other person who is interested in heavy metal, anime, gaming, and programming (as it was until the late-90s for the most part).
That's great because mail readers have supported threading for decades. It's pretty essential for using a mailing list.
Most mail readers support it, but not Microsoft ones. Somehow they managed to ruin this simple feature. This caused Google to reinvent it in the early 2000s and announce it like it was an innovation of their own.
I’m almost certain thunderbird soft wraps plaintext emails when composing rather than inserting actual line breaks for that reason.
Besides, shorter lines are easier to read and parse; I’d take an 80 columns width text anytime over a 120+ cols, like more and more people tend to use.
For thousands of years prior to the invention of HTML email, back unto the ages of cuneiform on clay, people managed to express themselves. Entire competing schools of rhetoric developed to teach people how best to express themselves, long before any form of electronic mail existed. Some of those schools focused on eloquence and interest, others on brevity and clarity, and those were both possible with plain text written by reed pens and ink on papyrus. I wonder whether relying on HTML for one's expression is really better than cultivating a writing style that suffices to convey one's thoughts independently of the medium used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
It was when the flood of incomers was large enough that the enculturation process failed.
Being technical is a pathway and IQ only identifies how fast you can travel down that pathway. Someone who started before you but who moves slower can still be far beyond you or have gone down paths to treasures you would never discover because you with your high IQ decided it was dumb.
Axiom 2: There are vastly more windbags and vicious people than there are knowledgeable and mature people.
Axiom 3: Online moderation / gatekeeping is imperfect.
Axiom 4: Successful moderation depends on a few keystone people.
Lemma 1: A community of knowledgeable, mature people will be under perpetual assault by entropy. The internet baseline of know-nothing gasbags and vicious, damaged people will be pounding on the gates of any community.
Lemma 2: Some of the horde will bypass any gatekeeping and moderation to land blows on the knowledgeable and mature people. They'll be repulsed, and some will leave the community.
Lemma 3: The keystone moderators are inevitably among the people subjected to these blows. After a serious blow or one blow too many, some will get fed up and leave, and moderation will get worse, increasing the rate of knowledgeable and mature people getting repulsed by their own community and leaving. A hole will form in the fortifications, and the barbarians will flood in, driving out everyone mature and knowledgeable.
Thereom: A knowledgeable, mature online community that is open to new users will eventually collapse into the internet baseline.
Corollary 1: If you're knowledgeable and mature and currently part of an open online community you love, you too will eventually get repulsed by it and leave. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Corollary 2: There are several knowledgeable and mature people here on Hacker News. They're here entirely because of dang. He is our keystone, weathering the assault of the barbarians for all of our sake. When he throws in the towel, we're done.
Truer words were never said about Hacker News.
I think he's paid. I hope he's paid.
People introduced me to Usenet and told me to lurk on any group for a few weeks to see how people communicate before jumping in.
I remember coming back to school in the fall of 1993 and there were all these new people on the forums asking dumb questions. People would reply "Read the FAQ!" and they would just ignore it and ask questions already answered in the FAQ
I remember people making filters and kill files for anything ending in @aol.com
If there was less potential for abuse through spam, scams, or (less likely but still worrying) targeted attacks then I would be much more likely to use email for regular communication outside of work.
But that was way too much effort. I don’t bother now. My Gmail address (josephg) is a cornucopia of junk. It gets the pay slips from a mechanic, lollypop orders, delivery notifications for shoes, Indian cell phone bills, and all sorts of things. I declared bankruptcy on that account years ago and moved on.
I have the same issue with a guy in another state. I know everything he rents from Redbox and everything he buys from harbor freight.
From my experience, spam/abuse is more likely with addresses used with online shops (the smaller ones seem to get hacked quite often) than with mailing lists.
Think of it this way: The Linux people and many other OSS projects have no problems with mailing lists.
That's a very biased view ("many people work like that so they like it") and I disagree.
I think that email based development is a fence to contribution. At least for myself.
Despites being of that generation, I really started contributing to open source when the GitHub model appeared (and previously in the Perl world thanks to rt.cpan.org, a ticketing system with both web and e-mail interfaces). I prefer to have communication centered about one project to be hosted with all the other data about the project instead of having everything in my inbox.
Few open source projects start nowadays with a mailing list based development process. I can't even cite one.
Most of the projects on https://sr.ht/ (basically all that aren't only mirrored there from somewhere else) do (as it did itself).
It hasn’t gone away. It’s usage has changed though.
I do think it's a useful model for private discussions, with plenty of supporting software. It wouldn't be bad for internal company use. But it doesn't have animated emojis and trophies, so no one would use it now.
Google Groups used to be handy for shadowing a bunch of Usenet groups, but that's gone now. I'm not sure how much Usenet exists these days.
In all seriousness, Reddit is the modern successor. I dislike a lot about Reddit; their UI/UX is a contender for the worst in the entire world; and they provide a forum for a lot of the most unpleasant people in the world (not quite 4chan bad, but pretty bad). But at the end of the day, Reddit is where most threaded public conversations moved to.
Some of the most interesting applications of NNTP would never connect to the legacy usenet network, which as you mention is/was a mess.
It didn't, as long as your server didn't distribute binary newsgroups, which where the only thing requiring a substantial amount of space. Furthermore, servers had no obligation to keep a long retention history, and could limit it to a few months if they wanted so.
Yes, I vote for NNTP. In my previous life I used to run a local NNTP/Usenet/Fidonet gateway, storage was not an issue at all, but bandwidth was.
The NNTP distribution model was you could take whatever subset of feeds you wanted and keep them however long your storage and bandwidth allowed. Back in the day, a 56Kbps link worked pretty well. A T-1 meant you could pick up the funner binaries feeds. You don't need some multi-meg JS frameworks to read that content. Now, it works fine with GigE and multi-terabyte storage. There's even an RFC for running it over TLS.
Reddit is the modern replacement? Things are that bad?
The sweet spot for me would be something like Discourse or even an old-school PHPBB. Slack has a similar problem to IRC - it's ephemeral and the answers don't show up on Google.
NodeBB's a lighter and more performant alternative to Discourse.
I think Google Groups killed Usenet when they made a web interface for it. It was flooded with people who didn't understand how it worked. There was a definite turning point at that time, and I cancelled my subscription.
I guess that's something. I've made "the leet list" of my own and encouraged friends to join (my friends are in their early 20s, so they are not quite acquainted with email, lol) and this worked out. The slow pace is a feature and people seem to be loving it. https://lists.sr.ht/~badt/leet
With Google's abuses coming to light I'm actually glad it didn't pick up.
What's more, not everybody follows etiquette:
- reply and just keep the original message at the bottom
- reply in between the original message
- reply at the bottom with the original message on top
- Some mix quotes and then reply to some parts in the original
And then how do you link to users or messages from your email client?
Plus who wants to have 5 different email accounts for 5 different mailing-lists? And why would I respond in a manner that allows the world to see my private email address?
I heavily disagree that emails are the way forward in this regard (maybe even in any regard).
- incentivizes thoughtful consideration before sending
- increases reliability of the list as an archive
You seem confused. Signing up to multiple mailing lists won’t require you to have multiple email addresses, and at the same time they don’t require you to subscribe using your main email address either. Many email hosts will give you as many mailboxes as you like, either using plus–addresses or just new mailbox names.
> And then how do you link to users or messages from your email client?
Every email has a unique message id. Simply include a message id in the body of the email, and your email client should turn it into a link (provided you happen to have that message available). If your email client doesn’t do that, perhaps you need a better email client.
> They are unbrowsable and who likes getting their inbox spammed in order to follow a discussion?
It really sounds like you need a better email client, or you just need to learn how to use the one you have better.
Which email client does?
It has some restrictions that I occasionally want to relax though. It doesn’t keep a complete database of all message ids it has seen in your inbox, just a list of the ones it most recently pulled into a summary. For example, if you pull up a summary that includes the latest 100 messages in your INBOX, then the links will take you to any message within those 100, but clicking on a link to a message older than that just tells you that it can’t find the message id in the summary.
I have heard this sentiment a lot and tried a lot of email clients and personally I still don't enjoy using any email client for this task. A properly designed forum software is always going to be easier to use for its express purpose than a mail client.
I just put the emails into a folder, skipping my inbox, and browse them at my leisure.
What kind of mad person dumps listservs directly into their inbox.
I like managing this client side rather than trying to figure out how to fix this on the server for everyone.
The kind of mad person who tries to use a Hey.com email account with a listserv...
That being said, the old Usenet was indeed a place to properly discuss. I can even remember a time before that, of using FidoNet, a BBS-based messaging platform. The quality of discussion in the proper channels there was pretty great.
Source: I help run some discussion mailing lists.
The real problem with mailing lists are businesses who have a vested interest in permitting spam to be delivered to users' inboxes.
And sadly most modern search engines don't rank these conversations highly in searches. There's a treasure trove of unbelievable hidden ideas out there that you'll never come across because search algorithms prioritize garbage, corporate churned content.
People love to say email is a bad technology, but my hypothesis is that other messaging tools have succeeded because people use email improperly. Email is a highly manual medium and degrades rapidly unless people use it well. When people behave selfishly or rush (lazy subject line changes, reverse chronological messages, lazy quoting & replies written deep in old messages, off subject replies, etc.) email gets hard to read.
I'd argue that is a bad technology, at least for a general-use tool. I admit that I don't use mailing lists but I don't see how they have any advantages over a well-implemented forum. Trying to run a project over email and building an archival service to cope with it seems like a reversal of priorities.
Linux [1] and Mediawiki [2] are two communities finding success with email lists. In those examples, the list archives can be read like a forum. Replies must be sent by email. It seems like the archive browser could benefit from a UX upgrade.
Basically, mailing lists are just a "special" email account everyone can send/receive emails to/from.
For example this is the norm on many Debian mailing lists. Or at least some people firmly consider it a norm, and will grouch at people CC'ing them.
The fact that this varies from list to list, and it's not encoded in software and you're just supposed to know which style to use, and that people then blame the human senders for not getting it right all the time, is among the reasons that mailing lists can be an unwelcoming medium.
Like you, I much prefer mailing lists over any sort of web forum (discord included). I hate Swift’s forums. I like the Python mailing list. One idea the reasons is that in the mailing list, I get to pick my tool (my mail client), and you can pick yours. We’re leveraging an already strong communication ecosystem of tools.
1. Moderation tools on mailing lists are extremely rudimentary. A healthy community _needs_ moderation of some sort.
2. A lot of tooling is necessary to make a good mailing list experience. I would expect an inclusive community mailing list to have a web interface for posting and searching, and a separate interface for searching.
3. There's no documentation on setting up email clients to use mailing lists and it isn't a trivial/intuitive process. The email spam problem has made the registration process non-intuitive and often drops emails to/from the list.
4. There's very little documentation on setting up your email client to use a list properly. What are best practices for organizing your inbox around a mailing list? How do you reply to a list? How do you quote a previous response?
5. There's no easy basic flow for folks to get started with. The power of more "modern" approaches is that the default web interface is highly opinionated. This makes it easy to join and easy to participate. When there's no basic flow to use, folks never get to the basics before they get to a point of wanting to customize their flow.
I think a blessed mailing list flow using a webmail client, a web newsgroup/BBS interface (which doesn't exist now sadly), or a blessed email client workflow would go a long way to making mailing lists accessible. Unfortunately because mailing lists are only popular among tech people these days, I doubt you'll see much work on this.
Now I understand why Google's mail service automatically classifies any alerts the user signs up for from Google's mailing list service as spam.
There used to be a third participant in that flamewar, a brilliant analog IC designer whose hobby was ruining s.e.d by posting off-topic political flames and trolling. His participation ended a few years ago when he apparently died of cancer. I say "apparently" because there was no obituary, no funeral, no mourners. His family won't talk about him. He had been so proud of his granddaughter.
It's unfortunate because there are/were a lot of talented and knowledgable people on s.e.d who could be talking about circuits instead of flinging dung at each other.
Flamewars are an ugly Usenet tradition. Usenet also provides great mitigation tools (killfiles/scorefiles).
Zulip is a better than most chat for that, because you commit to a topic, which adds order and caring.
But it's still fast, so it's tempting to writz anything you thinl about.
When I'm on my phone I stop commenting on HN midway quite often because the effort is not worth it. On a computer, it's too easy to type.
With longer comments I usually quit because the editing required to sound like a halfway intelligent person is way harder on a phone. I imagine some other people can nail their first draft, and others just don’t care how they come across.
I've never used Zulip, but realistically, how does it differ from Slack's thread system?
The second thing is that Zulip's UX is fantastic. You can zoom in and out of conversations with a single keystroke, and the UI is responsive and does exactly what you want. Slack is so slow on my new Ryzen that I frequently out-type it, and half my keystrokes end up interpreted as channel-switching keystrokes, so I end up having typed something random in a random channel instead. Fuck Slack, sincerely.
I feel like Slack would have been a lot nicer for those discussions iff you could sign up to one and sign in to many. I have way too many slack items in my password manager. It's a pain having to making changes to multiple ones.
Yeah, Slack is even worse than email for most uses. At least with email you have conversation threads that consolidate discussion on a topic that you can actually find later. My experience with Slack (and similar) that that everything gets fragmented immediately, to the degree that you can never put it back together again.
IMHO, Slack is only good for a few narrow cases (e.g. replacing long coordination email chains, organizing lunch).
Just recently I spent an hour unbundling a mail chain with layers of poor quote - reply - ask for clarification - further reply.
The way we use slack is start a top level topic and group all related discussion in a thread.
Same at my company: Top level comments initiate a thread, and all responses must be made as comments within the thread.
If I had my way, I'd take it a step further and require that Slack be treated like a message board, not a chatroom. If you have something to say, then say it all at once in one cohesive paragraph or set of paragraphs -- just as we do here. I do not want to be pinged multiple times in rapid succession while someone sends every thought they have in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, e.g.:
>> hi
>> can you help me with a problem?
>> i need to do x with y but i'm not sure about how to handle z
>> oh wait
>> nvm
>> figured it out
Awful.
I'm not saying email is perfect or always works well, it just seems to naturally work better more often in some ways.
> The way we use slack is start a top level topic and group all related discussion in a thread.
My company has not been disciplined about that, and even when threads are used new ones get started to continue the same topic relatively frequently.
While if I start a slack discussion, the thread is in once place, and everyone sees the state in real time, so the thread is more coherent and easier to follow.
Jesus no. Please, just no. There is a reason why people are favoring Discord, Slack, Facebook Groups and whatever else over the old strongholds (mailing lists, IRC):
- anything email based (including usenet) requires you to expose (at least) your email address to the general public, meaning you will get hounded by spam
- mailing lists (by design) have to break common anti-spam schemes and it's difficult to get the workarounds done correctly, so you'll end up fighting your spam filter all the time to read the emails you want to read
- mailing lists require strict moderation to avoid people abusing it for spam, which leads to issues when the sole moderator goes off on holidays and no new mails come through.
- mailing list management tools are often enough a pretty horrid/inconsistent mess
- for each mailing list you join (and want/need to stay in longer), you have to setup folders and filters in your mail client/provider, and you have to follow the incantation of the specific mailing list to opt out, whereas IRC and Discord make organizing and leaving easy
- mailing lists and many IRC channels end up being publicly indexed in Google which may or may not be in your interest
- many mailing lists and IRC in general restrict incoming content to plain-text or limit file sizes which means it's hard to enrich a question with screenshots, videos or binary files.
- mailing lists are asynchronous and don't support different modes of communication that do not require exposing your phone number publicly - it's not (easily) possible to have a quick call to quickly solve an issue, yet a 1 minute phone call can transport much more density than wasting half an hour playing email ping-pong
I'm sad about IRC though given that there hasn't been any major reaction to Slack and Discord, which led to an erosion of its userbase and then the final implosion of Freenode.
They (and news groups) are better for a different kind of discussions, and especially for digging out things that have been previously already discussed, and already contain a solution to your problem. Good luck doing that in instant messaging software.
In short, pick a right tool for the job.
I love the bad search, the poor integration, and the web interface to a product with the functionality of an '80s app. It just burns so much time, but hey the wasted hours are all chargeable and that sure pays the bills.
And for finding stuff, you are absolute right, anything deemed relevant gets archived to my Notes instead.
I really don't want to get a new phone just for this...
Usually, a heavy email thread will start with a multi-paragraph essay, and try to get to some sort of consensus from the participants. Where google docs lets users comment on a specific phrase or word, and have a discussion thread based on that highlight, Google Docs makes it possible to have a conversation about a specific part of the document. By allowing for shared editing, Docs allows someone who came later to rewrite words or phrases (if that user is allowed to).
If I'm working on any sort of a doc - engineering design doc, marketing copy, whatever - with multiple people, both email and slack fall short compared to a Google Doc. It's got a specific use case, so it's not remotely a replacement for slack or email, but there's a lot of good, focused communication happening in those comment margins.
Hate discord since you can't jump in a conversation that happened 30 min. before, as it would get mixed with the current conversations. Now they have the threads, and the `in reply to`, but I feel that they way they did the threads don't help for separating the conversations and keeping them on long-term
When a mod confronts them over a violation, they'll say something like "Oh. Sorry. But now that I have your attention, can you help me with this quick thing?" Mods who deal with this stuff over and over will start getting tyrannical with their rule-enforcement, and I don't blame them.
That's a big reason why forums are better for Q&A.
Meanwhile people mostly arrive at forums from google searches and link to posts without thinking about it.
It's the difference between writing a book and giving a speech. Imagine if we started burning books because people can just talk over a phone. That's what replacing forums with discord is.
Moving from forums to discord is another step in destroying everything that made open web great. It's sad that people don't even understand what they are losing.
For what it is worth, Discord does have permalinks to old messages. You definitely aren't going to find a 10 year old link today in large part because Discord hasn't been around 10 years yet, but I've copy and pasted Discord permalinks before to get points across and I have friends that use it for answering FAQs (have notes full of Discord links to copy/paste to answer common questions).
For what it is worth, there are users that use search on Discord (including the sorts that copy/paste the permalinks to answer FAQs). Maybe "nobody" thinks to "search first" is a truism, but even then I've seen plenty of forums full of the exact same users that never think to search first when they enter a forum and go directly to asking a question previously answered many times before. (Even when they arrive in a forum from a google search on that very question, people like/prefer the immediacy/power/relationship of folks responding directly to them than a canned answer.)
I'm not saying Discord is particularly great at some of these use cases or even the right answer, but they are very comparable and it's definitely nothing like burning books to chat over a phone. (That's a really broken analogy for several reasons.)
(ETA: If there is something to criticize Discord here for, it's much more the centralizing force problem that old forums used to be distributed across every style of web host in the old web, but Discord is a single for-profit point of failure for so many eggs to be put in one basket.)
forums don't necessarily need to block search engine crawlers to prevent bad behavior, that would most likely be done with restrictions on account registration or limitation on what new users can post (one forum I am on hides posts from new account until they've been reviewed by a mod)
People are in a hurry, if you’re not giving them what they want, then just get the fuck out of the way.
If you aren't willing to interact with people as humans, that doesn't give you the right to treat them as tools. The people who are interested in talking about some game mod don't owe you the ability to quickly look up information about it.
And it has the same problems of one-way escalating moderator strictness.
I'm not trying to downplay the problems you run in to, I've seen all of this and worse. It just seems that you chose tooling that doesn't work well for actually managing support, so you have to beat your users into the right shape to fit your software.
Godspeed, I guess.
I was referring to things like open source software, game mods, photography enthusiast communities, etc. These kinds of communities are often on Discord these days, and suffer from the problems I mentioned previously. These lead to heavy-handed moderation.
But this seems like a problem of your own making.
If users keep doing the same thing over and over, then the problem probably isn’t the users but the forum.
I think this is because discord was designed for deep users and groups of friends who had lots of preexisting context as well as a desire to be part of something longstanding.
Support forums are for people with no context and don’t want to join anything, they just need help. So making someone join a server, with specific rules they don’t give a shit about results in these problems.
There needs to be a “read only” mode that lets me read a server and explore without joining. This is a strength of forums, mailing list archives, and even IRC.
Mods complaining about modding hard stuff because they set it up to be hard doesn’t warrant much empathy from me.
The issues I described come up when you have a community that occasionally offers help. For example, there might be a Discord devoted to a game mod. People can gather there to hang out with the mod developers or just talk about gaming. They sometimes answer newbie questions, too. If you come to take advantage of their generosity, you should do it with the right attitude and respect-- just like if you show up at a game shop in real life hoping someone will teach you how to play Dungeons & Dragons.
And IRC has solved this problem for like what 40 years. The issue, I think, is discord servers have variable and unintuitive rules that users fail to understand.
I think I like protocols that follow the robustness principle in being accepting of lots of different inputs.
I personally have found the search on Discord to be very robust and good, actually. I'm curious to see why you are saying it's not searchable?
Alternatively, in the UI they could let you sign in to multiple accounts and then provide another layer of tabs to let you switch between those. That would help keep things organized but also can make navigation more difficult by adding another level to the navigation tree.
That's obviously less relevant when a majority of users are using desktop or mobile apps rather than browsers, but a plugin interface even for closed-source commercial desktop software used to be far more common than it is now, leaving users dependent on the development team to add features and usability.
I assume this decline is due to security concerns, wanting to be able to develop faster internally rather than needing to continue supporting old APIs for external developers, and marketplaces like Google Play and the App Store not wanting to enable competing marketplaces within the apps they distribute. It's a tradeoff to be sure, and I'm not sure moving past plugin functionality is a bad thing, but I find it a bit sad.
I guess if a big name like Google would ask them and ensures that privacy is preserved, they might cooperate to some degree.
How about if when the app's data is fully locked down, people start recording their screens and OCRing them? Incentivize it somehow. That way at least content that the participating users viewed would be indexed. Then you get back to trying to block people from recording their own screen with software, and after that hardware[1]. Never ending cat and mouse game.
1: https://pallycon.com/blog/choose-your-weapon-to-fight-screen... (see "Screen recording using camera")
And outside the technical level, discord also has the legal way. They can try to shut down your service, remove your code from public space and make you sink more time and money in an uphill-battle.
This is the same battle people are fighting against all walled gardens. And so far the gardens usually win. So someone taking on that fight, should be aware of this.
New users will have difficulties finding any discussion.
On the one hand, there are SUID binaries like Firejail and on the other, we have bubblewrap which uses unprivileged user namespaces, also used by Podman and Docker rootless containers. However, linux-hardened disables unprivileged user namespaces by default and the Arch Wiki has warnings plastered all over the Podman page about potential security risks of using unpriv user namespaces.
You speak as if these "random Arch Linux users" have written their opinions on the wiki rather than reasonable conclusions based on how unprivileged user namespaces have been a source security vulnerabilities in the past and is still seen as a security risk.
Maybe try not to let your bias get in the way?
firefox -P <profilename>
Also I have a "work" container I use for this type of thing, so that's also an option in my context menu.
It’s not like social media where you are required to have only one account and link it to your real name.
Using phone numbers for human verification is lazy and needlessly intrusive.
Plus in the real world, it’s also a way of separating your identities. I have a work number and personal number, and only attach the work number to business services. Sure, it won’t prevent Google from banning all your accounts but for everyone else it’s a hard barrier to correlating that you are the same person. Added to the fact that my work laptop uses VPN, and I’m pretty sure that sites like GitHub have no idea I have multiple accounts.
Is it? I can see this being the case for malicious conduct, but they have stated [1] that it's not a violation to have multiple accounts (granted, this was 4 years ago).
Edit: Ignore me; see reply.
You're right. Apparently the new part of the feature must be the ability for those with Nitro (the paid tier) to change their avatar per server. (At least, I'm guessing so; I've never had Nitro so I don't know if that was already available.)
This is what I get for posting too early in the morning.
xXx~Pu55yDe5troy3r69~xXx, is this you? I saw you the other day on the StackOverflow Discord where you were helping me with my HTML-RegEx! Thanks again!
Please don't make posts like this here.
I'd rather rather compromise on a couple of laughs than see HN become a generic reddit like forum / social network.
Just may 2 cents
I've had similar problems. I fully agree with the other commenter: if you have a point, just say it minus the cheek.
As mentioned in another comment: Quite the opposite.
Discord should easily allow to have completely separate identities with no connection to each other at all.
If that's not possible and there's the risk of mixing up my private life and whatnot with my work life, Discord should not be the place/service to use.
HN expects you to be civil, and abide by the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence " paradigm. I find them to be reasonable requirements.
If you'd like to express more heterodox views then there are a few rationalist-adjacent splinter groups around the internet with excellent discourse over a wide range of opinions. Each splinter group has different overton windows, but they're all of a really high quality.
I don't see how this contributtes to the civil discussion we are trying to have here on an interesting post.
I'd recommend just using the browser to make an alt.
Mods in smaller communities frequently greet everyone. If you pop in to check something then leave, you might as well @everyone that they're not good enough for you so you're out.
That said, Threads seem like they could have some functionality in some technical discords.
I think that's a very valid concern and I think it's a actually problem when Discord does not allow you to have different identities or switch easily between them without any connection at all.
I have more reasons to dislike discord (too bloated for my network, android app not good), by the way.
is it like slack that limit to < 10K messages on free spaces? Or Search is limitless?
You can also just buy a burner sim card. Either way it’ll only cost you a few dollars.
On Android you can use an app such as App Cloner to create a new Discord app and even give the icon a custom colour.
Forum representation is search results on Google in particular is abysmal. The way Google misrepresents the information mankind has created is actively making us less intelligent.
Stuff squirreled away in some discord server effectively doesn't exist outside of Discord's gamer chat platform. I'll take a poor representation that doesn't involve logging in and searching multiple platforms over essentially anything. What good are forums that don't appear in common search engines?
We've had twenty years of pseudonymous identities on the Internet and we've put the social fabric of humanity at risk. The needle is swinging towards "you get one identity, use it wisely" and I think that has absolutely been earned by those who abused pseudonymity to hurt others. No doubt the needle will swing back someday, and I will look forward to that once I've had a few years' break from the tragedy of today.
Unlimited identities switchable with a few mouse clicks.
I know a lot of people in the comments seem to hate Discord for this, but I personally love it. I guess I'm just saying this as a reminder that there are always others that do enjoy the other side. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[1] It's worth noting that I guess this is a Discord server specific setting, so that could vary I suppose.
The reason why I hate Discord as a replacement for forums is because I find it very hard to find whether my specific issue has already been discussed, and if I find something, it's quite hard to follow the intertwined discussions.
You're talking about a threaded-feature, I'm not familiar with that, maybe it helps. My latest experience with discord was around spring of this year, with some tokio(-rs) related projects.
But I find that something like stackoverflow or "Discussions" (not sure what the name of the app is, but many projects have them) are much more practical to use when you need to look up things.
It seems to me that with Discord, the way it works is you show up and ask your question, as opposed to searching the archives to see whether someone already asked it before.
That might result in a preference for Discord. With a refusal to research it's free developer tech support.
I'm not involved in any large open source project, but I'd expect I'd rather not answer the same question over and over. I'd therefore choose a platform which doesn't incite that behavior.
I've also seen similar done but with a bit of manual intervention. Some kind of support/mod person will see a repeated question and use a command to trigger a canned answer to that commonly asked question.
Or say they want log files, they would trigger a canned message from a bot explaining how a user can get that info.
In some sense it almost works like a support chat on a webpage. The support agents have canned responses and can link out to support articles.
That's exactly the issue I have. I even find it hard to find discussions I participated in. The scenario is that you discuss something (technical) and it almost works, but not quite with the improvements you're interested in being planned. You wait 3 months and go back to see if anything has changed and you have 3 months of a single, infinite scrolling page to sort through to see if the topic has come up again.
The threading support in discord will be interesting to see. I wonder if people will seek out historical threads and add to them or if you'll end up with an eternal September type situation where everyone gets fed up from answering the same questions over and over and starts screaming RTFM.
Are you aware of the from:@my_discord_name, in:#my_channel_name has:kind_of_content search keywords ?
I loathe seeing something I'm interested in, something math/science or technology oriented, on Discord. Quoting, and agreeing with you, "I think it's way better to use a system I am already signed up for." I don't want to sign up for a friggin Discord, or a Telegram, or a Slack, or a Whatsapp, and who knows how many other variants of IRC, just to find information!! I have "account fatigue".
I already have a web browser!
Why should I create an account on some closed source platform (that will probably collapse in 5-10 years like all of them), and learn yet another style of markup and communication and lingo...
It's much better for this information to be on a webpage, possibly a web archive of a threaded email list, or a subreddit. I can read the thread, get my answer, then close the tab without carrying around a basket of one-off bullshit accounts I created to join a plethora of chat rooms. And when I leave, it's worth noting that the comments/questions are still on the page, and indexed by a search engine for those to find after I'm gone.
Compare with discord, where it's ephemeral and behind a walled garden. Even worse, I think proliferation of discord chat rooms might suck the useful people and information away from areas of the internet I can easily access, and hide them somewhere hard to get.
I'm appreciative of your comment and glad you made it. It's good to be reminded that kindred others enjoy the "other side", but remember it slices both ways. :)
"Discordization" makes it more convenient for you, but at the cost of making it less accessible for others. I suspect the bulk of your happiness with it derives from your early presence in the ecosystem, not because of any strengths of the platform itself.
A possibly better solution would be something that doesn't put up any barriers to entry for any of us. :)
Discord chats are persistent.
Couldn't the solution be a mastodon instance/server?
If people used careful tagging combined with search, it might enable all that seeking for help online, but without signing on for another forum every time they're dealing with a new topic.
"Sign in with XYZ" exists on every serious website.
> I also love the new threads feature by Discord to keep convos more concise and isolated. That has helped forums on Discord a ton.
It helped because it's a forum feature, not a chat feature.
> my comments/questions are still on the server for those to find via search if they join after I'm gone
Nobody will ever see the answers, they'll ask again
Because they never had to find a lengthy guide on how to implement something on a Rails blog that disappeared and took its information to the grave with it.
There are a bunch of technical products I repeatedly come into contact with that have coalesced around Discord instead of a forum, and it's a huge pain in the ass to find any information that I need.
Which is part of the point anyway, it's "people new to tech/young people" culture to never search for things by yourself and always ask. That's why so many people use discord.
Why wouldn't Discord's support site say, "Meet us in the Support Discord"?
So now I can easily find a ton of clubs Discord servers and join them. These clubs would not be suited for a forum at all and they make more sense in a more "live" kind of setting. I see people in these club discords doing voice chats and streaming games to each other all the time.
It seems like this is more the target for Discord, but a lot of people have repurposed it for their own things like using it for their companies chats and support. It's no surprise that you need to use a ton of bots to make this better supported as Discord so far hasn't really focused much on that side of things.
Discord very-much seems like a younger generation kind of tool and a lot of older people come to it and try and make it fit other purposes.
Reading another comment about someone whose company used this for their internal communication is just crazy. While yes it is a good platform they should have known it was a poor choice with having their historical chat history locked into the platform.
I think any important and useful information should be stored via other methods. And I actually have seen this done as well. I've seen common answers to questions that will get added to some kind of FAQ style page online and that will be linked to when someone asks that common question.
Discord is pretty focused still on the gaming/community side of things and I think it does this part pretty well. I have seen it used to supplement many things. Many game servers have a Discord associated with them. Twitch streamers have their own Discord communities. Each game typically has at least one main Discord for it. Discord now supports discovering discord servers for clubs at your University. But in all of these cases I am mentioning being able to search this from a Google Search is not important. In fact in some ways I think it's preferred from a privacy standpoint to not have random chat messages I send be archived on random sites.
I think the problem is that people are trying to use Discord for purposes it wasn't really designed for. So it's funny when these people then complain about it.
This is my problem with Discord-instead-of-forums. I completely agree with your privacy point, I don't want or need every word I type recorded and crawled by every search engine. Ephemeral conversations are useful and important.
It's incredibly frustrating when a Discord server is the only avenue for help with a project. Discord, even at its best, isn't discoverable and is barely searchable.
It's not necessarily a new problem though. Ten years ago it was "find us at #projectname on Freenode". Before that it was join a mailing list.
What's amusing in an annoying way is groups are running into old problems but not learning from old solutions. FAQs were invented because online conversations weren't necessarily persistent. If you joined an IRC channel, mailing list, or followed a newsgroup at time t there was no guarantee you'd have access to any conversations that happened at t-1. So people would make curated lists of common, that is frequently asked, questions. These would end up posted regularly to those ephemeral communications or added to a persistent presence (web, FTP, etc).
I'd be far less annoyed by "join our Discord" if someone involved would persist some common or just novel questions to a persistent FAQ that's discoverable on the Web. It might not be as good as a wiki or forum but it's a lot lower friction than joining a Discord server to ask a question a hundred other people have asked.
With Discord you (or any user) can at least run one of the various off-the-shelf logger bots. And someone would still have to make it available, and who knows how nice it would be to consume, probably not very.
So I'm not sure either have much advantage here if the origin dies forever.
I think most people like the Discord interface enough. That's not reason to leave. The migration away is because it's an open source company, so Discord is poorly aligned with the company's values, and there is a constant search for better, more open alternatives. (They are migrating away from Google services as well.)
I really like the Discord interface for real-time chat. Nicer than Slack or IRC (and I'm comfortable with IRC, I used to be active on it in the old days).
The Discord GUI on top of a "modern IRC", specifically with publicly archivable channels, would be great.
But the way high quality information is constantly being posted then lost forever in practice is a big loss. Searching within Discord works if you know exactly what you are looking for. But you have to know, and wider searches such as with Google or any other tool that look through the rest of the company's online materials will never find the content in Discord. That's unfortunate as Discord tends to be where, by far, the highest quality and quantity of information is.
As a result of the company's migration away from Discord, we expect an abrupt discontinuity, as the new platform won't have access to the old Discord conversations. Then all the years of high value content people have put into Discord will effectively disappear, as nobody will search Discord when they aren't even using it any more.
What we'd really like is a gateway that allows the Discord content to be available in other platforms, generally searchable on the company's intranet, and on the internet for public channels.
If our Discord content was more openly accessible and shareable, even while using a closed source product, we might not be migrating at all. We'd probably let people choose their preferred client instead to access the shared real-time content. But it's not that accessible, and it's unfortunate so much expert knowledge will be lost in the migration.
Also, at my company we've really enjoyed Mattermost over the years. The main chat platform is open source, they make money by selling a paid enterprise plguin suite. All your messages are in a database you control, you can translate them to whatever you want.
Lots of customizations possible to make it to suit all your needs.
However, Slack|Discord individually are vastly inferior individually to:
A Wiki (Take your pick)
Text Based Chat (IRC/XMPP, you choose a client)
Forums (Take your pick)
Voice Chat (Mumble&Murmur/Teamspeak)
Video Streams (Twitch/Youtube/Others)
Mapping Strategy Apps (Take your pick)
Tying this together with a common directory or identity service makes it really integrated, so you don't have 5k identities, but you may have credentials per service. This is what you see many mature gaming organizations doing. Of course, this is serious gaming and less accessible so less idea for a completely open "just join our discord" type community.
Text: Chat -> Forums -> Wiki
Video: Twitch -> YouTube -> Movies
Voice: Discord -> Podcasts -> Books on Tape?
Which can be summarized as, in how long the information lasts:
Media: 1 minute -> 1 day -> 1 year
Left side is experimental for people who absolutely love the activity, right side is high quality and condensed for people who just want the information. As the right side has higher standards, it will be more correct but less up to date. On things that are rapidly evolving you might want to drop down to a lower level.
What we need is for it to be as trivial as possible for the information that is happening in chats to make its way to forum posts in a cleaner format, and eventually into wikis where all experimentation has been refined into just truths. All of this needs to be open and so we can't have 9 different services all trying to hold their section hostage.
As information moves from idea to discussion to documentation, choose the right tool for the job. Chat systems like discord, or even an email list, are useful for ephemeral discussion and working things out. Once a concept stabilizes, move it to a wiki that is organized and edited to be a concise, focused document.
One of the key insights when you view the model this way is that people are always trying to avoid "filter bubbles", but it's actually totally okay to have filter bubbles in the idea stage, which should open up in the discussion stage, and should be totally gone by the documentation stage.
So one chat community -> one wiki community doesn't make sense. You want sub-communities that can come together to groom the information as it matures.
Another way to look at this is Breadth First Search vs Depth First Search. DFS moves fast and tries to find new ideas, BFS moves slow and makes sure it's taking the correct path. Think about Chess bots that need to go very far down the search space to make the next move.
It's okay for the idea stage to be bubbly. It helps them come up with ideas. if the wiki stage is of all one mindset, you have an issue.
Further thinking since I made this post, I realized when thinking through this model, no wonder why the internet is so toxic. Most people, the less experienced, who should be reading verified Wiki-level information are reading Facebook and similar, a Chat-level discourse. No wonder disinformation flows.
Of course it makes sense why. Unverified stuff is simply more exciting than known stuff that's been filtered of all of the impossible stuff. How do we get most people to read boring wiki entries? Read textbooks?
Unfortunately, for a gaming organization it really brings to the fore the need for knowledge management, and discipline around what makes its way into the Forum, to a Sticky on the Forum, and from there, to the Wiki as Doctrine/Policy. Kind of comedy how much this needs to resemble RL organizations
TheQuartering was banned yesterday after appearing on a stream with Alex Jones.
I don't even consider it a forum. I consider it chat. I think there's really two different products.
I don't mind discord for chat, but it's awful as a question / answer support system. Slack is the same thing. I think the reason they're popular as a support destination is because lazy people that don't want to make any effort can pop in, ask a question, and get an answer.
I'm not calling you lazy BTW.
My biggest issue is they don't scale and it's really hard to find historical information. The chat is usually cluttered with simple information and one huge, de-threaded, infinite scroll is almost impossible to navigate in any reasonable manner (at least for me).
That said, I think discord could get better with the new threading feature. As people create high quality threads the moderators could pin them and categorize them. You could even create categories and let users create and manage their own threads. Oh wait. That's a traditional forum. Lol.
Based on the very few discord servers I've joined, I think the biggest thing that makes it useful is that it isn't saturated with dumbasses (yet). For example, the Cloudflare discord for Workers / Pages seems to be a smaller, more informed userbase than the forums. I think some of the devs might even hang out there, but I imagine that'll stop if they see mass adoption and the same questions get asked repeatedly.
Wondering if https://sqwok.im would fit this use case? Each post has a built-in chat room, is public and doesn't require a login to view on mobile/desktop web.
I think as the web and search engines have deteriorated things like discord, telegram and twitter have become the places you need to navigate to find information. If you want to learn how a brand new framework with zero docs works you need to ctrl-f their discord and ask questions there, its by far the quickest and easiest way
The good side of using Discord - or similar chat platforms is that interaction seems to be faster than on forums but by a cost of being buried under memes or all sorts of unrelated information and messages. Then, there's also the issue of longevity of information on Discord if server beside the generic social operation is being used as a way of support for the community; the ticket systems are in most of the cases temporary - your issue once resolved is being deleted and you cannot access it again.
The advantage of forums - at least for me, is that information on these is within the reach of every person by a standard search engine; you can "comb" through stuff globally or by using local forums search feature. You don't need to be on particular forums to access it, unlike on Discord. But there are of course downsides like limited access to content (register to access links, images) or search engines not being able to index all stuff.
I'd personally prefer if Discord would be used as complementary tool for any community and not as the replacement of forums.
Not sure if reddit with its subs counts as forums or more as an content aggregator with commenting feature. But still, some communities use subs as one of official communication channels or unofficial but with "blessing", or as an unofficial alternative to official forums (the r/guildwars2 vs official strictly moderated forums case).
Couldn't the solution be a mastodon instance/server?
If people used careful tagging combined with search, it might enable all that seeking for help online, but without signing on for another forum every time they're dealing with a new topic.
But on the other side, it's a very well protected walled garden, and communities can distance themselves from the rest of the world there quite well. Not really sure whether it's good to have so many communities growing in the shadows, outside the public attention.
All forums, even 20 year old ones, allow you to easily comply with GDPR data requests and deletions without additional tooling from the admin panels: because good moderation tools used to be a thing that didn’t need legal enforcement.
If there was, that would actually be really preferred to me. A web app that melded the discord experience of live chat, but also had topics that could be discussed and kept around for both search engines and archives to look back.
But every forum I could find is still a very old and outdated experience. A big one being that you need to refresh the page to see a new response which really changes the dynamic of a conversation. The designs of those forums also really feel like the early 2000s.
Did I miss something or did modern versions of forums just never really get developed?
It's just a mediocre forum, but with "modern web" designs/quirks. It does the whole single-page app thing, tons of wasted space/terrible information density, every single thread is displayed in one giant infinite-scrolling list (I've yet to see an instance with proper "subforums", just tags/categories), and it barely works without javascript (although at least it works).
My favorite modern forum software I've encountered is XenForo, although it's neither free nor open source.
This is not high on my list of complaints, and I'd even venture to say it is an advantage. Asynchronous forums like HN / StackOverflow attract much higher quality (as in, self-contained, thoughtful, informative, and searchable) answers than the Discord servers I'm a part of.
The endless scroll is a problem too. Because nobody wants to scroll through n-hundred posts, you also end up with the same handful of posts being re-made ad infinitum. Old paged style forums suffered from this to some extent but pages being bite-sized lended to more people reading the whole thread.
I've recently tried Flarum and Discourse, and the biggest issue is that PHP and Ruby on Rails are unforgivably slow and complex. Granted, Flarum/Discourse are way better than PhpBB/NodeBB/etcBB, but after few months I can't update to a new version due to a lot of PHP/Ruby complexity/dependencies related stuff.
Another thing is that forums eventually become a mess of outdated/broken plugins that extend functionality and add features. It seems extending functionality is an afterthought in most forum engines. As a result I try to avoid to use any plugins at all just to keep the site running and not to spend sleepless nights upgrading/fixing code.
> forum owners often won't upgrade their website ... plugins that likely will break
Maybe then it'd make sense if I mentioned Talkyard https://github.com/debiki/talkyard — it's forum software with automatic upgrades. I'm developing it. There's not yet any plugin system, instead currently "everything" is built-in, and there are (unfortunately) fewer features.
Will an automatic upgrade break plugins then? Because I can't see that being optimal.
Maybe one answer can be 1) a public automatic tests repository, 2) release channels, 3) incompatibility auto warnings, and 4) organization internal tests.
1: (for plugin developers) The plugin developers could write automatic tests of their plugins, save them in a plugin-auto-tests source code repository, which the Talkyard developers then would run as part of the Continuous Integration builds (which happens many times more often than new version releases).
The plugin developers would get notified about plugins getting broken, before new Talkyard versions had been released. And could either fix those problems, or tell the Talkyard developers to "please don't do that change at least not now".
2: (for plugin users) Talkyard has release channels (inspired by Kubernetes [1]) — there's a Rapid, a Regular and a Stable channel. (Currently only a Regular channel.) One's Talkyard site could stay on the Stable channel, meaning, there'd be about half a year between the day when a plugin problem got noticed, and a new Talkyard version had been promoted to the Stable channel. That ought to be enough time to have done something about plugin breakage. (Security bug fixes, though, would get added to the Stable release channel, as soon as sensible.)
[1]: https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/rel...
3: (for both developers and users) There's an automatic notices system in Talkyard. If a plugin uses deprecated functionality, Talkyard can show a warning to the Talkyard forum admins, and then they can decide what to do. Maybe contact the plugin developers? If they don't reply in a month, try finding a new plugin? Contact Talkyard and ask them to take over mainenance of the plugin? (These incompatibility auto warnings are less-noise than subscribing to new-releases-announcement emails, because these warnings would inform you about only the deprecated functionality the plugins on your site use.)
4: If it's super important that a plugin won't break, then the organization could setup a test environment with at a Rapid release channel version of Talkyard. Then they could do their own internal private tests of new versions, about half a year before they'd appear in the Stable channel.
If all these (at least 1-2-3) were in place, I'd think that theoretically, yes plugins could still break. But maybe it would no longer be the right thing to "worry" about. (Auto upgrades are optional, b.t.w., and enabled by default.)
Not some self-updating battery-draining endless scrolling website. Yes, I'm looking at you, Discourse. Not to mention the tremendous amount of edge cases where it fails because its complexity is simply out of control. For example, it drops posts on any kind of connection interruption (tab sleep, network down, device sleep, …) unless you refresh.
I am building just that at https://sqwok.im & would be interested to show it to you.
On Sqwok, each post contains a built-in chat room, is open to the public, shareable by url, supports markdown etc, can be ephemeral or long lived, and are posted to the user's account similar to Twitter.
One key advantage is both can link together: https://blog.discourse.org/2021/05/discord-and-discourse-bet...
Not sure. There's the propiatary muut.com (which also maintains riot.js), and there's zulip which might be the best Foss "modern" forum?
Then there is the hn clones (anarki/news, lobste.rs) and the more old school dfeed that runs d-lang forums.
I wish they hadn't updated their forum software indeed. I share your opinion about it: very slow, lots of wasted, white space, and stuff which may or may not be displayed correctly depending on your browser; in a word: modern.
As in other kinds of software, even traditional "*BB" pieces of software follow the fads: add tons of Javacript and heavily revamp interfaces to look trendy. So you can't trust the same piece of software on which you've been relying for decades not to become like that one day.
If I am not mistaken, it used to be running vBulletin. Now it seems to be running Xenforo (which some posts in this thread seem to praise). The problem in SSC's case was that they had let the former piece of software and database rot (the former owner had lost interest/energy for some time, and then sold to a company which didn't do much about it for some more time), so there were frequent troubles, and that justified a big jump "forward".
Luckily I have been banned from there enough times that I don't bother recreating accounts and write there any more, I just browse it 3 times a year nowadays. :-)
Though I feel forums are more geared around asynchronous conversation anyway.
Isn’t Reddit that killed forums like 10 years ago? People who used to read Eurogamer’s forums probably read /r/games nowadays, and some more specialized subreddits (by platforms, by genres, by games, etc), and some other ones unrelated to video games.
Unfortunately, yes. I love reddit, but it suffers from a major issue that most forums didn't suffer from: homogeneity of thought, with little options for those who go against the grain, either in general or on one particular issue. If you have an unpopular opinion amongst a subreddit's members, your comment is ignored at best or goes to the bottom of the pile, never to be seen by anyone. How is this healthy for discussion?
Even if you were to go on a forum made of members with a completely different set of ideals and opinions, unless you were a jerk about it, your voice would be just as "audible" as everyone else's. Everyone could have their say and not be silenced just because they were outnumbered. And you weren't writing just to get the most upvotes, or having to tread super lightly in the hopes that you wouldn't offend anyone or have them downvote you instead of actually, you know, responding to you telling you why you're wrong.
Sometimes we all need to be exposed to things we don't like. Yes, the upvote/downvote tree system may have largely solved the "asshole forum member" problem, and that's great. And for some things, the upvote/downvote system is awesome. Finding a solution to a problem? On a forum you have to go through most of the posts - on reddit, the best answer is probably going to be at the top.
But at what cost? Reddit just feels like a form of censorship to me - even when politics aren't what's being discussed. Just because the government or a corporation isn't the one directly doing it, doesn't make it a good thing suddenly.
Not even from a pure user posting perspective, it’s just too easy to manipulate them for things like subtle advertising.
I worry though that we’ve entered a world where people don’t know how to look for content without it.
I'm surprised Reddit's weird racially segregated subs don't get more attention.
Doesn't this differ drastically from subreddit to subreddit? It's really hard to talk about Reddit as this one place with one line of thought when it is really made up of disparate groups each with their own moderation style.
What are these "against the grain" opinions that you can't find a subreddit for?
I have the same feeling using it… it’s just feels like a chore.
Yet from 1000 feet, the UI does seem like an upgrade in phpBB, and the actual functionality lists so many checkboxes that it’s a wonder it has any competition.
They tried to solve this with a weird pseudo scroll bar in threads, but it still lacks dimension. There is no way to tell if the next 10 posts will be long or short. The pseudo scroll bar is just weird in general. I don’t really have anything succinct I can say about the way the pseudo bar represents dates but I can say it’s disorienting. I really should write about this
I'd really like to make Discourse workable for as many people as I can, for many of the reasons discussed throughout these comments!
Take my physical space. I have a feel for where different kinds of knowledge are based on their placement. For example in different books, on various bookshelves, on different pieces of paper, on different areas of whiteboards, even at different physical sites. Not that it is well organised (I'm messy and this is a problem for me), but when it's well organised physically that helps. For my mental map of where information is, my mind benefits from knowing where things are, and that they aren't being moved around much by someone else, without my knowledge.
Same with data on my computers, organised into directories, projects, files, even hosts. Even though it's huge, messy, and terabytes are too much, there is some kind of organisation and it's mostly metaphorically-geographical.
I don't use Discourse much. When I do, the experience feels more like swimming through amorphous knowledge. I can't really explain why, as I haven't tried to understand it; I'm just sharing my thoughts on it here as you asked for feedback.
Inevitably, I have reached Discourse via a Google search result or some link. There, I may scroll through the answers on a topic. Then I get to section at the end which shows related discussions. I read some of them because they sound interesting or relevant, and it's like walking an unstructured knowledge graph with no sense of spatial or organised structure, at least not one that fits my mind's preference for how it catalogues knowlege.
I do this graph-walking a lot on Wikipedia; it doesn't bother me that a hyperlinked graph exists. I sink hours into that some days, more than some people would say I should. I love reading Wikipedia and learning that way. It is difficult to explain why that doesn't invoke the same feeling of disorientation. Perhaps it's because the knowledge and link graph are curated models of knowledge, and that curation isn't just in Wikipedia, it's a reflection of decades or centuries of organising knowledge.
When graph-walking on Discourse, moving from topic to topic via its proposed list of related topics feels more amorphous and unstructured. More like getting lost in an sea of unknowable size. If the relevant-links are quickly exhausted for some line of enquiry I have, it's not obvious if that's because there's no more relevant knowledge to be found, or if the algorithm has deselected other relevant knowledge in favour of things that aren't relevant for me.
In this regard, it is a very similar experience to Reddit, which I also only ever land on as the result of a search, look around a little out of curiosity, and then realise I'm essentially looking at diverse, random, largely unstructured chat about barely related things, and then it feels low value.
For me I think these concrete changes might help:
- Make the list of related topics longer. I don't recall how many are shown, but it's 5 in my mind, and 5 is like being directed through the graph with blinkers on, knowing (or feeling like) there are more relevant topics to what I'm looking into that are not shown, by an "algorithm" (see Facebook). Make it 100 ("more" button), rank them well, and don't require a login for that to work, because you're not even getting a cookie until I've used the site 100 times already and want to get more involved.
- Separate the list, the way Stack Overflow does it, into a list of topics that may have related information (ideally ranked in some way, and long enough to seem reasonably complete), versus a list of interesting hot topics.
- Somehow I always remember the Discourse experience as reading a single topic, then being directed to look at related topics if I'm interested. Pretty sure it does have some topic structure, but the way I always land on discussions via search and take it from there, somehow causes me to not notice any page organisation the site maintainers have provided. I know I can look for it, but, for reasons I can't explain, my impulse is always to follow the related-topics links first unless I'm really committed to browsing more of the site. So perhaps change the visual flow, to de-emphasise disorienting graph-walking, and encourage more awareness of forum structure; and encourage site maintainers to have good forum structure.
I think we also hear this a bit when people say they prefer "old" forums for unspecified reasons. Traditionally they're very top-down, you almost always enter through a category page... so you're naturally getting a feel for the taxonomy just by navigating to content. Discourse can also be configured this way, but it's very common for sites to default to the "latest" view, which can certainly feel like an endless stream of content.
- no clear delineators between post and replies, the slightly shaded divider lines just aren't enough for me, there should be a colour/shading difference to make it clearer.
- peoples profile photos are emphasised too much, especially on mobile with precious limited screen space (personally these should be off by default on mobile).
- timeline slider seems like another waste of screen space, perhaps hide by default?
Because of infinite scrolling the timeline is a critical component that I don't think we'd ever hide by default. If you enter a topic with 5,000 posts for example... without the timeline you have no way to quickly move through them. With the timeline you can click and drag to jump to the start/end or anywhere else.
Highly agree of the timeline, a useful feature from someone who hates to read new +100 pages on a forum thread.
- You use 73 vertical pixels after every. single. post. for just the reaction and permalink buttons. My browser's inner height is 947px when maximized, that means if I'm seeing the bottom of 4 posts, a full 30% of screen real estate for reading posts is dedicated to showing those buttons 4 times.
- Similarly, having the username and date sit above rather than beside each post, eats even more vertical space. I'm on the page because I want to read. the. thread., let me!
- If I scroll up too fast from the middle of a thread, I end up pulling down the top navbar, which, once the next set of posts loads, is immediately hidden again leading to the whole page jumping after each upward scroll.
- The first place it puts me is "Latest". I can't speak to the distribution of use-cases, but that's never been a helpful place to put me when I first land in a discourse. If I'm new, I want the lay of the land. And this is more true, the more busy the site is. So dropping me in "Categories" would be much more useful.
- Is the in-page scrollbar on a topic page scrolling through posts or time? Kind of both?
- A pipe dream I think, but I'd really like it if you made the browser think the page was actually the length of the full thread and then when I scroll my browser scrollbar it adheres to my expectations of navigating the page, even though things are only loaded on-demand.
- Once you scroll the topic list, you lose the header, and no longer have a reference for which number is "Replies" and which is "Views". You've got tooltips at least, but it still lends to the overall sense of confusion and not knowing where one is.
- I want to see the name of the original poster of a topic in the list view. No being able to hover to find out is not sufficient because it's not glanceable.
- In the list view, there is no visual distinction between the original poster, frequent posters, and the most recent poster. Original poster as first is fine, but it took me about 30 seconds bouncing around various icons and waiting for the hover to finally figure out that the last one is always the most recent poster. I thought that maybe for really popular threads it was only showing frequent posters.
- It is not sufficiently clear at a glance that, on a post in the list that has both a category and tags that they are separate things for separate ideas. At least bold the category
- You override ctrl-f in topics but DON'T override it in the topic list despite it being the same search. I find it annoying I can't use my normal ctrl-f, but for the behavior to be inconsistent is confusing.
- try.discourse.org in particular has a category "Uncategorized", but there are topics that have no category, not even "Uncategorized". Actually I just noticed that despite being in the "all categories" list and having a color associated with it, topics without a category don't get marked as such neither on the list page, nor the thread page, which I expected since it was treated as one in the navigation. Does the color for "Uncategorized" ever get used elsewhere?
- I expect to be able to search for multiple tags at once using the tags dropdown navigation
I sincerely hope this helps to improve my own experience when using discourse one day, but from what I've seen in investigating this, I suspect the level of minimalism in place is done on purpose, despite the negative impact on discoverability and usability, in which case basically everything I said will be dismissed since it's not what you're aiming for, or at least you don't think it is.
I'm not going to respond to everything here, but I just want you to know that it doesn't mean I think it's invalid or dismissible. I really do enjoy reading this stuff.
I also don't have the power internally to say "we're doing this now" but I do keep this stuff in mind when weighing in on new features or refactors.
> Is the in-page scrollbar on a topic page scrolling through posts or time? Kind of both?
Yes, it's kind of both. We call it a "timeline," which I guess puts the emphasis on time... but it's tracking how far you've progressed through the topic. You can drag it around to jump to a specific post or point in time.
> A pipe dream I think, but I'd really like it if you made the browser think the page was actually the length of the full thread and then when I scroll my browser scrollbar it adheres to my expectations of navigating the page, even though things are only loaded on-demand.
I'd prefer this too... to a point. There are some tricky bits, like we'd have to load the content to know how tall it's going to be. And it stops working to a point... with a few hundred posts the scrollbar approaches an unusable size, and there could be thousands of posts.
> It is not sufficiently clear at a glance that, on a post in the list that has both a category and tags that they are separate things for separate ideas. At least bold the category
Categories actually used to be bold! but we ended up backing off on that because they were distracting from titles. We have a few different category/tag styles that admins can configure, but if 90% of sites never change those... then it doesn't really matter... making the options for configuring this kind of thing more apparent is something we hope to improve soon.
>You override ctrl-f in topics but DON'T override it in the topic list despite it being the same search. I find it annoying I can't use my normal ctrl-f, but for the behavior to be inconsistent is confusing.
ctrl+f is definitely a common gripe... we try to be smart about it, but the inconsistency may not be worth it in the end.
Essentially we try to avoid hijacking browser search unless we think we can do a better job. Within topics, if there are a small number of posts and they're all on screen at once, we'll use browser search. If it's a long topic and not all the posts are available, we use our search because it searches all the posts in the topic, not just what's on the current "page" of infinite scrolling.
You can also hit ctrl+f a second time to get to browser search, but it's not discoverable and as evidenced by this reply... this is overly complex to explain.
> Actually I just noticed that despite being in the "all categories" list and having a color associated with it, topics without a category don't get marked as such neither on the list page, nor the thread page, which I expected since it was treated as one in the navigation. Does the color for "Uncategorized" ever get used elsewhere?
Good point. We should probably eliminate the color for Uncategorized unless we're using it elsewhere. Admins can optionally turn on the ability to always show "Uncategorized" with the color under uncategorized topic titles... but unless that setting is enabled we should suppress the color everywhere.
> I expect to be able to search for multiple tags at once using the tags dropdown navigation
Yes, I agree here 100%. I've raised this a couple times and we're slowly getting there. We actually already have the UI, but need some more work to make it the default for tags. You can see it in action by visiting a URL like https://try.discourse.org/tags/intersection/test/art
You're right that by default we lean towards being more minimal, but we know that's not what everyone wants. One of the longer term objectives we're starting to work on is making it easier for admins to easily change the appearance when they're setting up a new site. There's a lot we can change within our theming system, but at the moment it's not very approachable for the average admin and too many sites look very "default." I'd like to see more different looking Discourse sites that cater to their specific audiences, with different information density, hierarchy, structure, etc... and hopefully some of the stuff we're starting to work on now will move the needle in that direction.
With a fixed width like you have, you could probably calculate height upon submission and just have an accumulating cache of total thread height per thread.
As far as it not working in the extreme case, I'll point out it basically doesn't work in any case right now. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
> Categories actually used to be bold! but we ended up backing off on that because they were distracting from titles.
Bold was just an easy example. There's all kinds of ways you could make them differentiated beyond what appears to be the width of a double space between them. You could underline one, italicize, change the font size, change the color, put a '|' between them, put a box around each tag, etc. It's a design challenge, but hardly an insurmountable one.
> hopefully some of the stuff we're starting to work on now will move the needle in that direction.
I hope so too that one day landing on a discourse page when looking for information doesn't elicit an eyeroll from me. Clearly there's a talented team, and I wish you the best of luck.
- no clear delineators between post and replies, the slightly shaded divider lines just aren't enough for me, there should be a colour/shading difference to make it clearer.
- peoples profile photos are emphasised too much, especially on mobile with precious limited screen space (personally these should be off by default on mobile).
- timeline slider seems like another waste of screen space, perhaps hide by default?
I dunno, it’s a sort of uncanny valley where some of the ideas are good but the whole thing just grates on you.
I’ve used Flarum as an alternative and been much happier with it.
It's javascript-heavy and likes to behave more like an app than a good-old website.
It loads the messages dynamically -I never liked infinite scrolling-, can be slow and unreliable, especially on patchy internet connections, hijacks ctrl+f for its own search function and its UX is a weird combination of minimalism and fanciness.
Its setup is also more convoluted than I like.
“Intuitive” means “behaves how the user expects” – with computer things, that usually means “behaves how the user is used to”. If we focus on making things intuitive so they don't need instructions, and then don't provide instructions, we're just discriminating against people who haven't already got computer experience (preventing them from ever gaining it, by never telling them how things work).
That's why your example of needing tags to bold text is an excellent example of shitty UX. A WYSIWYG editor where you click the Bold option to enable it, and click it again to disable it would be much better.
> We offer official Discourse hosting, or install Discourse yourself in the cloud in under 30 minutes.
> Discourse is 100% free open source forum software, now and forever.
The plans shown on the pricing page are managed plan. You can install it on your server without problem.
After struggling to get it to run and import our existing forum data, I just shrugged and went for Xenforo, which just works. And without all the shit that happened with its predecessor, vBulletin, and its split / recommercialization and rebuild to OOP-style PHP at the cost of performance.
I have no clue what's going on with it though, it doesn't seem to get much updates / developer activity.
It does run better on droplets that are one up from the smallest $5/mo flavor. Some version upgrades will require a couple minutes of downtime if your system is memory constrained: but all the upgrades are done via the web UI or a single terminal command on the droplet.
I understand the maintenance issues though. Forum software like vBulleting or phpBB have had it's fair share of security issues. Let alone the costs for a small community forum.
However I do think that the moderation of forums is easier as opposed to moderating a chat. Where context can get lost in the different topics that are discussed in the same channel.
It's not just a feel. Discord's maximum message length limit is minuscule compared to many forums.
But forums are also much easier to moderate than Discord - a message or image you might not want posted in your Discord scrolls up quickly (as people react to a troll or something inappropriate), and you tend to need moderators on-hand a lot of the time to react quickly, which can also mean moderators from a bunch of different timezones are required. On forums, yes, a rule breaking message can be posted whenever, but the pace of chat is much slower and the immediacy of effect on everything that follows is lessened.
"Just find a friend who hasn't used discord and use their number".
Why do people trust this company with anything important?
Did that changed in the meanwhile?
A few weeks ago they decided to launch their own forums[2] and there is already a thousand members and three times that of posts.
I'm so glad they decided to go this way : build a community with a "fast and easy tool", and then improve this by setting up your own platform to welcome everyone.
I use Discord everyday but I agree, it's not THE tool that fits every need. Especially if we're talking long term engagement and knowledge repository.
[1] : https://cyclingtips.com/ [2] : https://forum.cyclingtips.com/about
I haven't been able to find a temp phone number to use for this purpose as the best I could muster was a vpn number that supports SMS but alas, that didn't work.
I'm fine with that, since they are popular platforms, the problem is when Twitter or Facebook are used EXCLUSIVELY for communication, this is insane. Governments should have RSS channels or forums maintained by governments themselves as a redundancy.
Another thing is all these businesses that have delegated their entire customer service to... Twitter and Facebook. My ISP did this recently, you can't even call them anymore or email them, they don't have a public phone number or phone line, you must go through Twitter for support, this is INSANE. I immediately cancelled my plan with them as soon as I found out.
Structuring discussions per topic is key. Each discussion should have a title. That's how mailing lists, newsgroups, forums, but also Zulip work. That's what I miss the most in Slack, Discord, Teams, etc.
Mailing lists work, but I miss the ability to edit a message to fix a typo or clarify something. Discourse provides a lot of quality of life improvements like to this compared to mailing lists. A forum like Discourse can also seem more lively, with typing notifications and live updates, without becoming annoying like a chat system.
A few years ago, the usage of the forum began declining significantly. In mid-2019, we created a Discord server for the game, and people started joining immediately.
It's been nearly a year now since there was more than a single forum post per month.
If you want to engage your community, you need to go where they are—or where they want to be. I'm not at all thrilled with the fact that the major out-of-game community hub for my game is now hosted on a proprietary platform still looking for proper monetization, but I am thrilled with how much people love interacting with each other on it. And more importantly, I don't have a realistic alternative to offer them.
Then the name got co-opted so marketing peple could push crap around more easily.
Forums are decentralised so you are someone else on the forum for game A than on the forum for hobby B, unless you work to link your identities. Whereas the big social media platforms aspire to be a one stop shop.
Additionally forums generally sort by "newest thread first" or "most recently replied thread first" rather than trying to push the "hottest" threads or "trending threads" or similar at you.
On Facebook everyone has a transparent identity, yet somehow seems more like an anon if outside of your real life circle. On Twitter post and follower counts don't correlate with having thoughtful or informed opinions. On Reddit shitposting dilutes everything, with a dash of Instagram-like flex culture for karma points, and the effect / bias towards a hive mind is too powerful.
I don't think you can prevent people from migrating to discord or slack, but I built a Slack app that tries to bring the best and most frequent conversations to the web.
The issues brought up here are exactly what I am trying to solve.
For example, several times I've joined a server to ask a question about an obscure game mechanic, and gotten helpful answers in a few minutes.
The flip side is none of that information is crawlable on the web, so it is lost like sand through an hourglass. Whereas with forums (or their replacement, reddit) somebody in the future could benefit from my Q/A session by finding it on a search engine.
The second major problem I have is identity. When I post in a channel about school, I want to use my real face and name. When I post in a random server, I want anonymity.
You could argue that IRC fits in the category of ephemeral platforms, but most large communities provide some form of indexable log of the conversations
I've used IRC for the last 25 years or so, and BBS:es before that, and forums alongside it.
Forums are great for nesting information and discussion for future reference, but less equipped for fast discussion on issues more ephemeral (or fun).
A lot of people used only forums, even for things where I would go to IRC.
These people could be well served by Discord (ignoring any discussion on proprietary software/data integrity/ownership etc).
As a product, I really love Discord. I don't want everything to end up there, for various reasons, but the most important of which is discoverability and persistence.
Please stop closing forums that are an information resource for both members and non-members. But some forums are just slow chat, in which case those users abandoning the forum are likely better served elsewhere.
If i cannot find it, I won't be able to participate.
A web forum is very different from a chat program, they sit at different levels and have different purposes. Even Discord's support uses a forum like system and not a chat room [1].
You can count me in as an old head who loves (because it works SO WELL) and hates (because it's so locked down) Discord.
I think they’re right though. I’m inclined to think that chat in general facilitates a staccato of quick-takes that paralyzes reader and writer from forming complete thoughts. Adding some activation energy to communicate seems to encourage more thoughtful statements. Twitter is an obvious argument by contradiction of this.
Reddit is a terrible alternative to forums. It's hard to actually have quality conversations there as communication is by default time based e.g the later you are in thread the less chance someone will read what you have written, and it's popularity based e.g. lowest common denominator memes and predictable comments will hog 90% of communication unless the sub is heavily moderated.
Communication on forums is much longer living and discussions have opportunities to evolve into something else, which creates an environment for more meaningful communication. And if you like your memes, well there's probably a thread for that.
But Reddit is great for niche hobbies or topics. The subreddits are much smaller and more manageable to moderate without needing full-time influencers to moderate. The sweet spot seems to be around 100,000 subscribers with a few hundred active at any time; at that size you have enough new content that the default view isn’t static, but not so much that you get lost in the noise. As for being time-based, forums suffer from this as well — if your post reply isn’t on the first or last page, it’s probably not getting read.
Forums suffer from significant bitrot — particularly when images are involved. A sizeable percentage of those useful forum posts from 10 years ago aren’t really useful anymore because all the images are gone and the links are dead. Reddit at least has a centralized infrastructure that is actively maintained.
Furthermore, accounts can be anonymous and not linked to e-mail which limits the blast radius of any data leaks (which are VERY common once a forum starts to fall behind on patching). For relatively niche topics, Reddit is probably the best option.
Are there bots 'farming' karma? To what end, what's the point?
Some people also do it for the lulz, it’s not that hard to build a bot using markov chains (there are plenty of Reddit comment datasets you can image match to the same meme, which is an interesting engineering project for someone wanting to learn those methods).
For example, consider a PC hardware subreddit/forum. Let's assume people repeatedly (every few days) ask certain common questions such as "Should I buy the SuPerB A100 or A200 CPU?" or "Should I go for 16 GB or 32 GB of RAM?" or "Is the stock CPU cooler sufficient for the A200 CPU?" [1] Essentially, questions often asked by relatively inexperienced users which are - to some extent - obvious to the subreddit/forum veterans.
In Forums, moderators often close threads with those questions with comments like "This has already been answered 100 times - research your question first". Unfortunately, exactly these topics are invariably going to show up first in your favorite search engine. And the built-in search function of most forums is borderline unusable, or gated behind registration (which IMHO is an anti-feature, I don't know who came up with that idea).
In Subreddits, moderators create mega-threads for simple questions, with the effect that you have weekly giant threads that totally unorganized (since it's just a random collection of hundreds of unrelated questions) and unsearchable. Especially considering Reddit's search function has also turned useless at some point: I sometimes try to use it to look for terms that have definitely been mentioned a lot of times in a certain subreddit (e.g. searching for "Linux" in a Linux subreddit), but the search still didn't turn up any results.
I guess one of the better ways to provide typical, standard answers to common questions is the Q&A format (Stack Overflow), but that comes with its own pitfalls.
[1] After writing these examples, I realized they might not be optimal since those questions often do rely on the context (e.g. "Use 32 GB of RAM if you run a lot of VMs/use $memory_hungry_software, otherwise 16 GB is enough") - but let's assume for a moment these questions have clear standard answers.
But that's not true for most types of discussions and communication.
The point based default sorting also makes it difficult for any late entrant to participate in the conversation. The community has already decided what consensus is and that topic will quickly disappear anyway.
HN has a great community but a shit format.
I am reading a manga and there's a reddit sub for it. Until a year ago give or take we were like 30 or 40. The manga was slowly moving the storyline but it picked up again and now there are tens of thousands of people. When there were only 30-40 people there used to be a stupid puerile joke related to the manga. You could see it once a week, or maybe in a lot of posts but quickly drowned or irrelevant anyway since only person did it. It was not mentioned much.
Now with all those people ? That supid joke/meme is present in every post, every comments. Every new chapter release gets many comments with that dumb joke.
I also feel like comments are now shorter and story theories much simpler and... well, quality is reduced. As you said, predictable comments are ruining the fun.
And to read anything you are almost required to be logged in because of the threading mechanism, just trying to do use find in the browser is annoying.
I'm using i.reddit.com right now and it seems to be working just fine.
Forums sometimes had those issues, but the centralization of Reddit is the problem.
The sooner Reddit dies and forums become decentralized again, the better
Also it is not really your forum as it can be quarantined or removed on the whim of the admins.
So yeah, it works, but with some big caveats.
One thing I particularly despise about reddit is having to scroll past the bevy of meme/joke/tired reference (is that a jojo reference?? unexpected letterkenny!!!) comments that percolate to the top thanks to upvotes. In reasonably popular subreddits anyway, more niche ones may not generate any comments at all.
I'd much rather find a megathread about a subject on some popular forum, start some time in the past and work my way through the posts in chronological order as god intended.
I have been using i.reddit.com for years on mobile. It works great.
I've managed a community—Product Notes—for several years on the platform and it has been fantastic.
https://lobste.rs (source: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters, Ruby back-end)
https://lemmy.ml (source: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy , Rust back-end, federated, in-development but usable)
https://postmill.xyz (source: https://gitlab.com/postmill/Postmill, PHP back-end)
There's also https://github.com/notabugio/notabug a P2P fork of old reddit UI (that used to be open source itself, old version: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit), and there's https://notabug.org/zPlus/freepost, I just found it searching for this stuff, those are the ones I know of.
I don't like discord either and don't like the model of megacorps sucking up all our communication and locking it away while creating a massive privacy risk and centralized control.
I think HN and subreddit UX is far superior to forum threads.
I'm also bullish on urbit as a solution to this core issue of solving this in a way that doesn't centralize ownership while also enabling a UI that doesn't suck.
Asking people to use forums will not succeed.
As far as their complaint about real time vs. static, I agree - but I think subreddits are just a better model for this anyway.
Urbit is a digital fiefdom made by a neo-fascist whom coded that arbitrary limits at the base of the protocol.
I cant get far enough away from that garbage.
I'm no fan of CY's neo-reactionary politics, but he's also no longer involved in the project and they're not relevant to the problems the design solves.
Similarly I think the 2008 monetary policy around QE was an incredible success, but I still think Bitcoin is worthwhile and interesting despite the fact Nakamoto thought the bailouts were a bad idea.
It's possible to look at these things separately imo. (John Nash, Bobby Fischer, etc. - long list of people that do worthwhile things but may believe things I don't agree with).
Simpler less technical intro: https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit
"HN" comment chains may be better (but that's debatable) than forum's linear discussions, but
HN "news" model (front page oriented) is terrible and everything that falls from front page is automatically dead, end of topic.
Forum discussions can last weeks, months or even years meanwhile everything that's 2 days old is dead on HN, here's no discussion once something disappears from front page.
It's the threading model I think is superior - the forum pages model where you get hundreds of slowly loading pages and horrible quoting, signatures, etc. make it unusable for me.
Gaming, I usually use Steam's built-in voice chat and/or rooms, and search for community forums within the game's page without hassle.
For meetings I use either MSTeams (unfortunately if I don't have the option) or telegram, the latter is even better now with the group calls and screen share.
When search for answers for a Github project, I go to discussions or create an issue.
How about a nice conversation tree? Usenet!
As opposed to a forum, where u have to make an account, wait X amount of time (days maybe) for your account to be allowed to make a post, make your post, then wait more days for a single response, and so on.
That is the value that will be lost.
I think that the author of this article didn't really consider what the communities' and companies' needs are, and is more interested in criticizing them for "making the Internet worse." For the author, it was all about him and his preferences, not about what the owners of the forums or their users want:
> Due to this, our forum community has declined over the years to the point where there are only a handful of people left actively using the forum.
It says it right there. Eurogamer had a dead forum.
There are going to be communities and companies that want forums for the exact reason the author likes them. They're great for technical support and searchable archiving of useful bits of knowledge. They're great for certain types of discussions. At the same time, not every community is out there looking to do that kind of thing. A lot of them just want to socialize live, and that's where services like Discord shine.
Ideally discord would be for unimportant or personal chat and forums would hold real discussion. We'll see if that approach survives.
My least favorite part about forums is having to create a new account for every single forum I want to access.
Sure, password managers make it easy to have hundreds of different accounts on different sites, but I just don’t want to do that because it makes everything feel clunky and disconnected.
Sure, most have Google/Twitter/GitHub logins available, but some don’t which only makes me think “wait did I use Google or Twitter to sign into this forum last time?”.
Discord has three things I like: a single account, infinite chat history, and the ability to star/favorite messages that are relevant to me for future reference. Those are all I really need to consider it a useful platform for forum-like discourse.
Speaking of that, some forum software like Discourse (and it’s mobile app, Discourse Hub) and Forem make it easier to consolidate tons of disparate forums, but any time I’m on an old phpBB or vBulletin site I usually don’t even bother making an account.
My own observations from the past decade+ is that the influx of new users to forums very quickly dissipated, and what remained is a senior membership clique with dwindling interest in discussion with each other, which led to exodus. This could all be owing to there being a hip-new-thing monopolizing people's attention rather than a failure on the part of forums... and there were a ton of forums. Until it implodes it seems people are satisfied expending their attention on reddit or discord. The other difficulty competing with reddit is, in part as an aggregator, it's a dopamine-pumping machine, updating with new headlines and content every instant.
WHY?! would I ever use a chat software to look up static information on a game? I know that information may or may change between releases but the release isn't daily or even close to that, so using a platform where I might have to read through or at least skim over hundreds of messages in conversation/support channels to find the right crumb of information is just insane to me. Also having to get an account and/or installing additional software for serving information which could just as well have been done with a fandom/wikia page and no unnecessary barriers is just utterly stupid.
So, not gonna happen. Discord has won forums for the foreseeable and is well on its way to FAANG tier dominance, impregnability, & scale
This article touches on the biggest frustration point of communities using discord for me. It completely removes from the public internet crowd sourced solutions to problems.
There is SO much valuable information locked in the communities that is near impossible to search for even WITHIN their platform.
I think the most important factor is archival work. Discord is transient, anything older than a day is lost, and as far as I know there's no public search history anywhere (gitter does have that iirc?).
There's a LOT of information and history in old forums and even old mailing list threads. I mean sure, 99% of it is probably useless, but it's that 1% that makes it worth keeping around IMO.
We expect to have a native feature allowing a configurable set of streams to be browsed using a real Zulip web app UI without creating an account, available in beta in the next few weeks; we're actively integrating the implementation via https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/18532.
We plan to look at optional search indexing in that native implementation once the logged-out access feature is complete.
Forums + chat + voting + flairs.
Automoderation for low quality stuff.
Builtin anti-spam, reporting, etc.
Pinning hot topics ...
Search is ok not great but you could build better search on top if it's critical.
Alt accounts are encouraged and relatively lightweight.
... and you can still have a Discord?
I get it, it's just another big platform but feature wise it's way better for forum migration...
Cause reddit will kick you out if other subs pressure reddit admins to do so.
The immediacy of chat has its place, but so does the semi-permanence of something like Discourse or Groups.io or a good, old-fashioned mailing list.
What should happen is closing of ancient phpbb boards and moving to discourse and that I see happen in tons of places. But closing a forum and moving to discord? A chat/voice-chat?
For the types of communities I'm thinking of (eg, certain retro gaming niches), forums had essentially been dead for years before Discord rolled around and helped revive a lot of conversations.
Maybe it's an awkward fit for technical stuff where you really just want Q&A, but I love it.
Don't type anything into discord you wouldn't print out and mail to Microsoft Legal. (And don't install the client, it is spyware.)
And moving everything to reddit is not a solution either, it's a hellhole.
Twitch, IG Live, FB Live, TT all have these auto-refreshing streams of comments in the UI.
Maybe, but I assume it's not age but because they have more freetime to sit in chatrooms.
Internet forums are the senate chamber
Discord and the like are the private chamber of whispers.
Caesar was murdered in the chamber, but you can guess where Brutus and Co conspired, and it wasn't the chamber.